Biden and What Might Have Been

What if Joe Biden had been able to put his ego aside? What if he actually became what he promised to be — a transitional rather than transformational figure, a president who would restore normalcy and rebuild the guard rails destroyed by his predecessor? And most importantly, what if he had committed to serve only one term?

Those are questions we can only ask with whimsy now because Biden chose another path. Addicted to power and the trappings of office — even in his 80’s — Biden acted from day one like a politician already running for reelection.

That reelection is very much in doubt now in part because he looks weak. He appears weak for two reasons. Obviously, he’s old, brittle and frail and has no business running for a second term that will make him 86 at the end of it, should he survive.

But the other reason that that charge of weakness gets some traction is that he’s incapable of standing up to his party’s hard-left — or rather he does so but only in fits and starts and in what looks more like panic than considered tacking. The immigration issue is the perfect example of this. Barely controlled immigration has soared under Biden. This is more than fine with the hard-left, though they might feel differently if it were comparative literature professors streaming into the country. What Biden considers to be his “base” wants nothing done because they welcome it, there being few college graduates among the migrants to threaten their jobs. But Biden can also see that the issue is killing him with independents and it’s not even helping him with Hispanic voters. So, he sloshes over to a Trump-like shut down of the border when asylum seekers swamp it. That, of course, angers the base, so this week he responds by giving illegal immigrants married to citizens a path to citizenship. As a matter of public policy, I think he was right to do that, but he clearly did it now only as a sop to the hard-left, which is unhappy about the new asylum policy. To the average voter Biden looks like he doesn’t know which way to turn on an issue that is vitally important to them. Donald Trump, on the other hand, has a very clear and forceful — if insane and pretty much racist — take on immigration.

The end result of all this is that the odds slightly favor a return of Trump to the presidency and it’s too late for Biden to change the image he’s earned. But, just for the sake of argument, what could have he done differently?

First, he should not have chosen Kamala Harris to be his running mate. That was the first sign that things were going to go off the rails. Biden announced from the start that his running mate would be a Black woman even before choosing a specific Black woman. That created the impression that race and gender were paramount, which it is to the tiny group of hard-left elites in his party but which it is not to anybody else. To make matters worse, Harris was never popular outside of California, a state that any Democrat will win in a walk. What he should have done was pick the person, regardless of identity, who had the best chance of developing into a solid, competent and popular heir apparent. Now, he’s stuck with Harris, even as she is clearly a drag on the ticket.

Second, he should have stayed — or at least stayed a while longer — in Afghanistan. Biden’s numbers took a dive eight months into his administration as the disastrous withdrawal played out on live TV, like Saigon, 1975. It called into question the very competence that was at the center of the image Biden wanted to cultivate. And that happened in part because Biden listened to the hard-left for whom isolationism is a religion. Ironically, in this case the left and Trump were on the same page: they wanted to leave at any cost. By rushing to get out, by abandoning Bagram Air Base too soon, and by telling the Taliban exactly when we’d leave, it made a bad situation exponentially worse. Even if you believe we should have left Afghanistan to the Taliban this was exactly the wrong way to do it. Disaster was not inevitable. Biden took a hit to perceptions of his competence because he deserved it.

Third, he should have populated his administration with moderate old hands like Larry Summers, Rahm Emanuel and William Galston. (Emanual got the ambassadorship to Japan, a plum assignment, but hardly in the White House inner circle.) Summers would have argued against the unnecessarily massive COVID bill that fueled the inflation that may now spell doom for a second term. Instead, the White House seems dominated by young, hard-left activists, steeped in coastal politics and pushing the Old Man to do things he probably instinctively would rather not. Paying off college loans and back door reparations are two examples. Not only do these things paint Biden as anything but a moderate, but they haven’t even earned him votes among those he was trying to help. It turns out a lot of people who didn’t get their college debt paid off blame him for not keeping his promise, never mind that it was the conservative Supreme Court that struck down his biggest plans. And, just this week it was reported that Black farmers, who were supposed to get their loans forgiven, also blame Biden for not coming through, even though once again it was the courts that killed — I think correctly — that plan.

Fourth, related to the point above, Biden should have gone out of his way to take on the extremists in his own party. He should have sought out his “Sister Souljah Moment” where he could break loudly with the hard-left. The perfect opportunity came early on over the COVID bill. The left had themselves convinced that the package had to add up to $1.9 trillion. Their narrative was that Pres. Obama’s bill in the wake of the 2008 housing meltdown was too small and that’s what led to the mid-term wipe out in 2010. The truth, of course, is that it was Obamacare that led to those losses. The problem wasn’t that the government spent too little, but that it had spent too much. Nonetheless, $1.9 trillion became gospel. Sen. Mitt Romney offered Biden a lifeline, a package at around $500 billion that would have been more than sufficient. Imagine what would have happened had Biden taken that deal. The left would have gone crazy and Biden could have shown average Americans that he was more concerned about deficits and inflation than Bernie Sanders’ feelings. He would have strengthened his image as bipartisan and reasonable. He would have also strengthened moderates in both parties, but especially among Republicans where that is needed more than ever. And it’s likely inflation would have been less severe. Does anybody remember a single thing out of the $1.9 trillion package, even the direct checks they got from the government? Did it buy a single vote? On the other hand, inflation may be the primary issue that keeps Biden from a second term. And yet, he wouldn’t work with Romney because he always intended to seek a second term and so he didn’t feel free to alienate the sacred base.

I like to believe that had he done all these things, right now a solid nominee, like for example Gretchen Whitmer, would be cruising to victory as a youngish, competent and moderate woman contrasting nicely with the angry, crazy and unhinged old man that is Donald Trump.

But the thing to keep in mind about Biden is that he has never been a moderate. Rather, he is a survivor. He looks for the power center of his party and then he goes there. And by the power center I do not mean the true ideological center which really is pretty much left-center. I mean where the activists and the money are and that’s on the hard-left. We should have known this for decades. After all, this is the devout Catholic whose deeply held beliefs made him an abortion opponent… until the center of the party shifted left and, through struggles with his conscience and prayer, he discovered, happily, that his own beliefs had moved with that of his party. God, it turns out, moves in mysterious and wonderful ways.

Biden had the chance to be a great president, not by doing bold, liberal things, but by simply being decent, sensible and centrist. Moderate Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger was right when she said back in 2021 that, “nobody elected him to be FDR.” His job at that point in American history was to calm the waters, and instead he roiled them.

I still hope to view the Biden presidency in the rear view mirror only starting in January of 2029. But whenever we can look back, we’re likely to do so in regret at a missed opportunity.